Poofyhairguy's HTPC Recommendation Thread

Great topic poof...im just onto this after sorting out the hardware with eskros and yours thread on builds (mostly eskros, correct ?:rolleyes...i see your giving the sammy drives a bashing there..i have 2 of those in my RAID5 array on my TS 439 pro ll..never had any trouble with them..surely they cant be as bad as the hitatchi deathstars ?

Anyway, i would always go with a dedicated NAS...just like the all roundness of it....but i was thinking..say i was running out of space on my QNAP 4x2TB NAS..it has two ethernet ports and numerous USB ports..would it be viable to setup up a spare parts box full of nice cheap hdd just to house the films and have it all linked up as if it were running off the NAS...so basically i could turn of the auxilart box when not being used ?..maybe even run it as a sperate enterty for unspecial films ?

Hi poofyhairguy (and all others)...

I am working on a setup for a small "home cinema" room and for this purpose I have decided to go with the xbmc / unRaid combination for media center / nas (also on basis of this very helpfull thread).

I only know the basics about linux, but have decided to give the linux version of xbmc a try On the basis of mostly this thread and a few ofthers, mainly by poofy - I have come up with the following system builds:

XBMC HTPC:

• CPU = Core i3 I3-2105 3 MB (Intel Boxed) BX80623I32105
• CPU Fan = Scythe BIG Shuriken SCBSK-1000
• Mainboard = Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 (rev. 1.0)
• Case = Silverstone Milo SST-ML03B HTPC Sort
• PSU = Sea Sonic X-400
• GFX = ASUS ENGT520 SILENT/DI/1GD3(LP) (1 GB)
• RAM = Kingston HyperX blu 2 x 4 GB
• SSD = Kingston SSDNow S100 16 GB
• BD-Drive = Samsung SH-B123L
• + some kind of remote...
  

unRaid NAS

• Mainboard = ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3
• CPU = Sempron 145 1 MB (AMD Processor in a Box (PIB))
• PSU = Corsair Builder Series CX430 V2
• RAM = Kingston ValueRAM 1 x 2 GB
• FANS = Enermax Magma UCMA12 * 2
• Cables = 4 * DeLOCK Seriel ATA kabel
• Cables = Molex male to 3x4-pin Molex Female Power Cable Splitter
• More Cables = NZXT Molex to 4 SATA Cable 200mm
• Software = unRaid Plus
• HDD = * 6 WD Caviar Green WD20EARS 2 TB
• + some case i have lying around...
  

My question is if these builds will suffice for streaming 3D Blu-Ray from the nas to the media center, and from there to a tv/projector. Natually it should also be capable of playing 3D Blu-Ray discs

I have gone with most of the recommendations made by poofyhairguy, and upgraded a little here and there... Perhaps overkill in some places!?

Thank you in advance for any help or input you might have, and a special thanks to you poofyhairguy for your very helpfull hardware posts - without these helpfull posts I would most likely not have been able to make a custom build HTPC...

Best Regards
Peter

My understanding is that currently in Linux-land playing local BR discs is achieved by in effect "streaming" the content playing off the disk to yourself, so ironically its the playing the local disks "in real time" that is more likely to be a problem then playing HD mkvs you have already ripped and copied to your server. Such is the genius of protected, closed video formats on open-source platforms.

But someone with more direct BR experience can maybe fill out the details.

That HTPC setup is totally overkill for just a frontend to an unRAID box. You can easily use an Atom 330+ION setup and it will work great. In fact, that's what I use along with my unRAID box.

Yeah I play 1080 mkvs from my unraid to my atom ion 330 all the time. What is the deal with the Linux Blueray work around though? Does it require a fast processor to "stream" content playing from a local drive to itself? I cough, cough rarely interact with physical BR disks so now I'm curious.

Superorb Wrote:That HTPC setup is totally overkill for just a frontend to an unRAID box. You can easily use an Atom 330+ION setup and it will work great. In fact, that's what I use along with my unRAID box.

I will be using it for 3D, and I was actually looking at a ION box at first but came across a few threads (including this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=693232&postcount=8) where it was mentioned that a ION HTPC would not quite cut it for full 3D.

Or did I misunderstand something?

Thanks for the input!
/Peter

I was actually considering a ION HTPC but discarded it due to some threads claiming that it would not be able to do real 3D (like this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=86495 - post 8). So the reason I went above and beyone (also with dedicated gfx) was to get a HTPC capable of doing full 1080p 3D - but the question yet remains if it can in fact deliver that

Thanks for the feed back
Peter

I dunno. I would assume 3D 1080p file size would essentially be double in size from normal 1080p files so it might top out some ion machines. That thread indicates that there are relatively few places to even get the disks as of yet and that the digital file format for backups isn't even settled yet and that they don't really play in XBMC regardless.

Which is why poofy was recommending the the SBS file format (basically two 720 images forming a 3-d image) as something easier to work with in XBMC and more available as a file format.

I would be highly dubious about running any of that other than the SBS files Poofy mentioned in Linux since as mentioned earlier Linux not does actually unencode Blueray disks currently but esentially rips it "live" to a https stream it then plays back to itself to circumvent blueray encoding. At least as I understand it.

I would expect considerable lag before all this as yet unsettled propietary format 3D stuff settles into an open source standard format on the Linux side. Just as a guess.

On a side note, I'm personally sort of annoyed by the concept of 3D in a home environment. Somehow sitting on my couch and having to where special glasses to watch just feel like opposites to me. I'm sure I'm just being an old fogey about. 3D still always feels kind of gimicky and distracting to me - even in features like Avatar designed for it. It doesn't go with working on a bottle of wine, snacks, ocassionally playing with the dog and his chew toy to me somehow. Maybe its me.

So IF I for some reason would want to watch pure 3D I would have to go with the windows version of xmbc and then PowerDVD to play the 3D movies? Is that correct?

If that is the case, would my build be sufficiant or would I need to upgrade it?

Sorry for my limited knowledge in this area

Best regards
Peter

Okay...

Now that I've built my unRAID and have TX'd all my files to array will I still need a dedicated Back-Up option either on my unRAID or on a separate machine? What do most unRAID folks do when it comes to backing up data?